Prudentia High IQ Society

I already wrote in the March issue of Prudentia Journal that there are a lot of high IQ societies and that many share the same members. What I have not investigated is the question whether it would make sense to merge all high IQ societies into one. First of all, we must be clear on the question what sense high IQ societies make. 1. They have websites with lists of members, so by joining a high IQ society you appear on the Internet and it is documented for everybody that you have a particular IQ. 2. They help likeminded people get to know each other. For the second purpose it might be sufficient if there were just one big high IQ society. But for the first purpose, maybe the current situation is better because different high IQ societies have different minimum IQ criteria. Randy Myers and Iakovos Koukas have several high IQ societies with different entrance criteria and this makes sense only inasmuch as people want to be differentiated. But this would not be a problem with having a sin

Welcome to the fifteenth issue of Prudentia Journal! Happy third anniversary of Prudentia High IQ Society! Three years after its foundation, Prudentia has more than 60 members from 26 different countries. This makes Prudentia one of the fastest growing high IQ societies in this world. And yet I have asked myself the question: Should all high IQ societies merge into one? This is the topic this issue of Prudentia Journal is investigating. Enjoy reading! Claus Volko, cdvolko (at) gmail (dot) com

Tim Roberts maintains the website http://www.unsolvedproblems.org/ in which he presents unsolved problems from mathematics, mostly conjectures that yet lack a formal proof. While working on these problems is fun, it may be useful to know that some problems might be unsolvable, so they are not worth the effort trying to solve them. By means of formal logic we can show that some problems are probably unsolvable. If we can reformulate a statement to be of the type "there does not exist any n for which ...", it is probably unprovable. Examples: Goldbach Conjecture The Goldbach Conjecture states that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. A number is prime if it is divisible only by itself and 1. So, for example, 36 = 17+19. This is equivalent to: For every integer n greater than 1, there is an integer k so that both n - k and n + k are prime numbers. Employing the existential quantifier only, we can reformulate this to: There does not exist any integer n grea

I have recently started re-reading the original paper on the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) by Christopher Langan. This paper is from 2002 and it was widely ignored or rejected by the academic world, but most of the criticism was not because of faults in the author's argumentation but because the readers had problems understanding the paper. Many critics stated that Christopher Langan was using words and phrases they did not know. By contrast, I had no problems reading the paper. Perhaps this is due to my higher intelligence. That makes me think: For academic discourse, an above-average level of intelligence is necessary. Some topics can only be discussed by highly intelligent people. This has nothing to do with elitism, it is human nature. Now the question is whether highly intelligent people are actually interested in discussing academic subjects. Sometimes I have the impression that the people in high IQ world have no interests other than intelligence testing i

I have an inordinately high IQ (as you dear reader in fact do). At least that’s the case as tested; mostly nonverbally but as I’ve aged and matured too—verbally. I don’t have any kind of autism, Asperger’s, or anything of that nature, however, being not infrequently anxious and having anxiety for no good reason. And at times, I can appear, at least I believe , quite slow and dim witted to the world and like a tortoise, even internalizing this perception or often “feeling” that way. I think that stems from the fact that I’m often bewildered, amazed or even stunned at what another will do or to what level they will stoop ; me, taking time as it were to compensate my external actions and behaviors with what was immediately cognitively or “internally” registered and slowly acted upon. For instance, just the other day I was playing a game of chess with someone. She’s a competent player, playing always rather swiftly and quickly—always it seems to me in bullet or blitz mode—buzzing so to spe

How we profit from IQ is frequently talked about in IQ societies. And the foregone conclusion: the higher the better . However, turns out there’s a cost associated with higher IQ, one put forth in a recent paper[1] indicating the good of high intelligence; more opportunities, higher self–awareness, etc and the more elusive bad or dark side to higher IQ; imbalances (mental and physical), debilitation, etc. In other words, there is a cost associated with IQ increase beyond some as yet, unknown value. Now, optimality, as we all know, is not necessarily being on top of the heap or at a maximum. Take an aspirin, it will get rid of a headache. Take a bottle of aspirin and you’ll be in the ER getting your stomach pumped. Even money— turns out you don’t want to make too much —has an optimal value being about $95,000.00 US dollars per year in the long run, that is, if one wants to be happy— optimally of course. Too, to determine optimality, as we all have learned, requires in the simplest sense